alternative coalition government. The Japanese
Socialist Party, at its strongest in the decade 1958
to 1967, could never muster enough votes to gain
more than 166 out of 467 seats (1958) and con-
tinued to grow weaker in the 1980s despite a
temporary upsurge in 1989. For more than three
decades the LDP was the ‘eternal’ ruling party.
Nonetheless, there was plenty of political
infighting within the umbrella Liberal Democratic
Party. The various groups within the party all
follow their own leader, whose views they then
unanimously back. Membership of a group is a
matter not of political attitude but of personal
attachment and loyalty. The ‘boss’ determines the
power of the group or faction, which rises or falls
or splits according to its success in influencing the
overall leadership. Thus strongmen dominate the
party, and bargains and alliances are struck
between the six or seven most powerful groups.
Cabinet posts, ministerial portfolios and party
executive positions comprise the patronage that
the president of the party is able to bestow once
he has obtained the support of enough factions
to take over the leadership. The ‘leadership fac-
tions’, having backed the right horse, enjoy
enhanced power; the ‘non-leadership factions’
now work for change so that they can be on the
winning side next time. So ‘democracy’ works
after a fashion, not between parties but within the
Liberal Democratic Party. The emphasis is less on
policies than on the power struggles among the
factions. The president of the party automatically
becomes the prime minister of the country. That
was how all the prime ministers of Japan were
chosen from the 1950s on.
The Japanese in-groups in politics, business
and the bureaucracy know the rules and know
how to play by them so as to make their influ-
ence felt. As individuals they have to conform to
the wishes of the leadership of their particular
interest group. From the interplay between these
groups, consensus policies eventually emerge. But
what about the sizeable minority who are not part
of the in-group – the politicians of the left, the
more militant trade unionists, citizens who do not
share the views of the Liberal Democratic Party?
What about the generation gap, those young
people who rebel against the elders’ practice of
trying to determine every facet of their later life?
And what about the small band of traditionalists
or nationalists who reject imported American
culture and Western-style politics? There is no
safety valve for their views. They are condemned
to be permanent outsiders, and their lack of influ-
ence through the established channels leads to
pent-up frustrations which periodically explode
into violence – as happened at the massive
demonstrations against the ratification of the
US–Japanese Mutual Security Treaty in April and
May 1960.
Just as it did in the West, student protest
boiled over in 1968 and 1969 in Tokyo, over the
need for university reform. In 1968 large-scale
demonstrations demanded the return of Okinawa,
the US-occupied island in the Pacific, and clam-
oured for the removal of American bases. There
were also street battles between police and stu-
dents over the government’s decision to build
another international airport outside Tokyo on
farmland. The clashes continued into the 1970s.
This was ‘direct democracy’, given that other con-
stitutional means of voicing dissent were blocked.
But protest was never strong enough seriously to
imperil the Japanese way of government or of
conducting business. Economic progress and the
promise of material benefit encouraged the
majority of the people to compete for the best
opportunities and to conform.
The dominant political leader during the occu-
pation years and immediately after was Shigeru
Yoshida, who was out of sympathy with General
MacArthur’s liberal and democratic views. He
welcomed the ‘reverse course’ which was adopted
as soon as Washington became primarily con-
cerned with the containment of communism.
Yoshida headed the government five times from
May 1946 to May 1947 and then from October
1948 to December 1954. A former career diplo-
mat, he became prime minister only because
Ichiro Hatoyama, who was president of the
Liberal Party, had chosen him as his successor.
Hatoyama had had to leave politics for a time
because he was unacceptable to the Americans:
like many early leaders, including Yoshida, he had
shared the ideology of Japan’s ‘co-prosperity
sphere’ in Asia before 1945. Yoshida rehabilitated